social computing

Publicize Your YouTube Video

Publicize Your YouTube Video

In our previous post, Script Your YouTube Video, we continued a new series on YouTube with a look at everything you need to know about scripting your video and what key elements to include.

In this post, we move on with our YouTube series with everything you need to know about publicizing your video and and increasing views.

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Publicizing Your YouTube Video

Your first step in publicizing your YouTube channel should be to post comments on related YouTube videos. You may attract some followers this way. But be careful. It’s probably not cool to post snarky comments on competitors’ videos. Consider including URLs in comments on related videos and even creating video responses. And don’t disable commenting on your channel. See the post on Dealing with Negatives for reasons why you don’t want to limit dissent.

Next, embed your YouTube videos on your Website and on your blogs. This makes them do double duty, and will attract viewers to your channel. There’s a bit more on embedding below.

Take a look at your competition and see how they are tagging their videos. Tag your videos the same way. This way, when their video is over, and YouTube displays other videos to view next, your video is likely to come up, as in the following figure

YouTube Publicize Post

Figure 1 — Suggested Videos Areas on YouTube Page

Subscribe to other channels. Just like following people on Twitter gets you your own followers, subscribing to other YouTube channels will get subscribers for your channel.

YouTube has an active social networking community. Invite your friends, and extend friend invitations to kindred souls. Friend the most popular channels in your field. Thank subscribers for subscribing by posting comments on their channels. Engage members of the various categories of channels, especially the Reporters channel. Participate in the community and you’ll attract subscribers.

You should create a special landing page on your Website for each of your videos. This page should be tailored for visitors who have arrived from YouTube, perhaps by addressing them directly — “Welcome YouTube viewer! Here’s more information on <the subject of the video>.” Be sure to include links to your other relevant videos and to actions the visitors can take on your site. Put buttons for the most important actions right on the landing page.

Creating landing pages is way better than dumping YouTube visitors right onto your main page — never do this — or even to an appropriate generic internal page. Take the time to customize your experience and embrace your YouTube community.

Depending on the video, up to 70 percent of people may view your YouTube videos from other sites, such as sites with embedded players, blogs, search engines, and the like, and thus many people will find your video by doing a search, either on YouTube or on Google or other search engine. Consequently, you need to search-engine-optimize your videos.

Next up: Optimize Your YouTube Videos


Publicize Your YouTube Video is the 138th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 364. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Script Your YouTube Video

Script Your YouTube Video

In our previous post, Create Your YouTube Video, we continued a new series on YouTube with a look at the all important step of actually creating your video, including how to shoot it and in what format.

In this post, we move on with our YouTube series with everything you need to know about scripting your video and what key elements to include.

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Script Your Video

While an exhaustive description of this topic is beyond the scope of this post (and our book, Be a Person- The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises – bit.ly/BeAPersonEFull ) here are some quick recommendations for the script of your video:

  • Keep it Short — The average length of a YouTube video is a little more than four minutes, but you should target between two and three minutes. If your issue is complex, break your video into several self-contained pieces and link them together using the tools YouTube provides.
  • Explain Your Solution — Right up front, tell about your business and the problem you solve, not necessarily the products that solve it. Include enough detail so that the viewer can decide to complete viewing the video. It’s best to use a real person on-screen for this portion of your video so you can better engage your audience.
  • Avoid Shocking Video at the Start — If your solution involves human tragedy or anything icky, don’t open with graphic footage. Create a relationship with your viewer and get them involved before hitting them with emotional footage. Such footage can be very effective and dramatic, but should probably be used sparingly, after establishing a connection with the viewer.
  • Build Empathy — If the problem you solve is emotional, don’t be afraid to empathically build a common bond with the viewer. Encourage an emotional response, and then tie those emotions to your call to action.
  • Empower Your Viewers — If you have a call to action but viewers can’t immediately act — by clicking a link to go to your site or by clicking right through to a Buy It Now button — you’ll lose the immediacy of the moment. Your video has affected your viewer, and he or she wants to act, now. Give them a way to buy right now, go to your site, follow you on Twitter, join your Facebook page, and subscribe to your blog feed. Show how taking an action will make a difference. Communicate that the viewer can make a difference by taking action now. Encourage viewers to create a video response to your video and link back to you.
  • Create a Sense of Urgency — Emphasize why your viewers need to take action now. If you are after sales or even donations, indicate a deadline for a sweepstakes or discount or other information to foster urgency.
  • Feed Back — If you have success with a video, make another video praising those who helped make that success and link it to the first video.

Consider creating a transcript of your video and using YouTube’s capability to add it as captioning.[1] This not only improves the accessibility of the video, but it may affect the indexing of it by search engines as well.

Once you upload the video, you’ll want to control the thumbnail image that displays in search listings.[2] YouTube offers you three thumbnails, using frames from the beginning, middle, and end (at the ¼, ½, and ¾ marks), and says you can’t offer a different one. While this is technically true, Michael Gray[3] figured out that, if you put the image you want to be your thumbnail in the exact middle of your video,[4] you’ll be able to select that image from the three that YouTube offers you. You have to be a little bit advanced in your video editor use to do this, however.

In addition to captioning, there are a variety of other things you can do to a video once it’s been uploaded. You can annotate it, which means to superimpose little text bubbles on the video. Audio Swap lets you replace your entire audio track with a selected song or other audio track. You can also change the title, description, and tags.

YouTubePostUpload

Figure 1 — Post-Upload Modification of YouTube Videos

Next up: Publicizing Your YouTube Video


Script Your YouTube Video is the 137th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 363. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] YouTube: Getting Started: Adding / Editing captions: bit.ly/d3HzpC

[2] YouTube: Getting Started: Picking a video thumbnail: bit.ly/9ypBMw

[3] Michael Gray: Video Optimization: Getting The Money Shot: bit.ly/c06c0J

[4] YouTube: How to Change Your YouTube Video Thumbnail to any Picture: bit.ly/9dztt8

Create Your YouTube Video

Create Your YouTube Video

In our previous post, Becoming Popular on YouTube, we continued a new series on YouTube with a look at the very important steps involved in planning your first YouTube video, including how to generate interest.

In this post, we move on with our YouTube series with the all important step of actually creating your video, including how to shoot it and in what format.

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Create Your YouTube Video

To create a video, you’ll need some way to capture images or video. If you have a mobile phone camera, that may be good enough. Otherwise, there are several very inexpensive cameras that produce surprisingly good videos.

You’ll need a way to get your videos onto a computer (although some cameras will let you post raw video from your camera directly to YouTube). And you’ll probably want a way to edit the video and audio, add background music and titles, and integrate video from multiple sources. Many operating systems now come with simple video editing programs such as Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie. There are plenty of free, shareware, and commercial video editors as well, of varying capabilities and complexity.

Using one of these programs, you’ll need to save a file in one of the formats YouTube accepts, including:

  • WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
  • .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files — (typically supporting h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
  • .AVI (Many cameras output this format — typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
  • .MPEGPS (Typically supporting MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
  • .WMV
  • .FLV (Adobe Flash — FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

That list may be a bit bewildering for the novice. Just look at your video editor’s output or Save As menu and see if it mentions any of the file extensions or types above. More than likely, it will output .AVI and possibly .MPEG4. No matter what output type you use, YouTube is going to re-encode it anyway. If you’re a video expert, see their advanced encoding advice.

Your video is generally limited to 15 minutes. You can increase the time limit by following YouTube’s instructions.  It appears that YouTube now permits files to be more than 20GB but keep in mind that a) your browser may not permit uploading files of that size and b) YouTube will really compress (get rid of detail) the clip so that it takes up less space on their servers. The more the file is compressed, the poorer the resulting video quality is.

It may seem daunting, but the basics are actually pretty easy to master with a bit of study.

Be sure that if you use any copyrighted material from other sources that you get permission, and post a notice of that permission at the end of your video. YouTube is committed to removing illegally-posted content from their service.

Next up: Script Your YouTube Video


Create Your YouTube Video is the 136th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 361. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Plan Your YouTube Video

In our previous post, Becoming Popular on YouTube, we continued a new series on YouTube with a look at how to create your own channel on YouTube for your enterprise.

In this post, we move on with our YouTube series with a look at the very important steps involved in planning your first YouTube video, including how to generate interest.

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Plan Your Video

Here are some general tips on creating and publicizing your YouTube videos:

  • Create a Video Strategy — Naturally, we recommend having a strategy before getting too involved in YouTube or other video sites. You should understand what’s going on already in your area of interest, who the players are, what they’re doing, what kind of community already follows your product category via video, and, most importantly, what you hope to accomplish with video. Create goals out of this strategy, and metrics to measure your progress. Your strategy should encompass not only YouTube, but Vimeo and other video sites, as well as how to get your supporters to embed videos on their sites (more on this in a bit). Finally, your strategy should lay out your Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) plan so you improve your findability on Google and other search engines (more on this later).
  • Reach Out — Post videos that get viewers talking via the comments section on YouTube. It’s best to include an invitation to comment at the end of your video — “We’d like to hear your ideas. Please use the comment section below to let us know what you think.” Deliver this message with a real person, who points down, indicating the area for comments below. Many users may not be aware of the comments section or how to find it.Then join the conversation with your own comments and video responses. YouTube lets anyone post a video response to a particular video, and it can be an effective way to broaden your reach, since each video response will attract its own viewers, who may be interested in your original video.
  • Partner Up — Find other organizations on YouTube you can partner with and promote each other. Remember, people will spend most of their time on YouTube viewing other videos. Partners can help you build your YouTube community.
  • Keep It Fresh — Put up new videos regularly. Don’t worry too much if you don’t have anything earth-shattering to say. Think of the exercise as a way to keep in contact with your community. Report on what your company is doing and planning to do, and give status on ongoing efforts. Remember to keep your videos short—ideally in the two- to three-minute range, and for sure under five minutes.
  • Spread Your Message — Share links and the embed code for your videos with supporters so they can help get the word out. Embedding means others can copy some simple code that YouTube generates into their Webpages and thus show your video on their sites. You can encourage viewers to embed the videos by having an on-screen person indicate the button that appears below your video and asking viewers to use it on their sites.
  • Be Genuine — High numbers of views come from content that’s compelling, rather than what’s hip. Make sure your videos and video channel are listed in the YouTube categories that are appropriate.

Next up: Create Your YouTube Video


Plan Your YouTube Video is the 135th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 360. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Create Your YouTube Channel

Create Your YouTube Channel

In our previous post, Becoming Popular on YouTube, we continued a new series on YouTube with a look at the most viewed videos and discuss why, as well as how to get views for your videos.

In this post, we press on with our YouTube series with a look at how to create your own channel on YouTube for your enterprise.

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Create Your YouTube Channel

The first thing you should do — really, right now; open a new tab at the end of this sentence and do it using the instructions that follow — is reserve an URL for your YouTube channel that matches your Website URL. Go ahead. We’ll wait.

Even if you don’t want to use YouTube today, you’ll want to make sure than nobody else uses your identity.

If you didn’t do it in the first paragraph, perhaps you didn’t know how. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your YouTube channel. Before you create an account, be sure you understand YouTube’s terms of service.[1]

  • Sign up for YouTube using the URL you want as your username. Go to bit.ly/bXkY5F to get started. You’ll see a form that looks like this:

YouTube signup form

Figure 1 — YouTube’s Signup Form Example

  • Make sure the username matches your Website’s domain name or the name of your business. For example, if your name is Widgets, Inc., make your username widgets or widgetsinc. You can create a username up to 20 characters long.
  • If you already have a YouTube or a Google account, you can add your new YouTube account to the existing one. If you create a new account, be sure you understand the question about Web History. Consenting to this means Google will track your Web activity while you’re logged in to your new account, even on other sites. It will use this information to improve your search experience. But you may not want this type of surveillance.
  • When you select Create a New Account and Finish, YouTube will send you a confirmation email that you must act upon before your new account is set up. BTW,[2] the wavy word that you must type into the box is known as a CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It’s a way to keep spambots from creating fake YouTube accounts. It’s named after a famous early computer pioneer and cryptographic hero of World War II, Alan Turing.
  • Once you respond to the email, you’re taken to YouTube and logged in.

You can customize the look of your channel by going to the dropdown by your name, in the upper right of your channel main page, and selecting Channel.

YouTube channel settings

Figure 2 — Change Settings on YouTube Example

  • Create tags for your channel so people can find you

Change the theme and colors — We recommend you upload a background image as part of your branding (see the Triangulate Your Social Media Presence post)

  • Add various modules such as Comments and Subscribers
  • Create Playlists
  • On your main channel page, you can:
    • Connect your Facebook account with YouTube
    • Find friends or associates on YouTube
  • On your Account Settings page you can:
    • Use your logo as your channel’s profile picture
    • Connect with your accounts on other social media sites

YouTube activity sharing

Figure 3 — Connecting YouTube with other Social Media Accounts Example

  • Insert a description of your organization in the Describe Yourself field — make sure it’s short and to the point — YouTubers are visually oriented, not text-oriented
  • Include URLs to your Websites

Now you can create videos — see YouTube’s Handbook for Ideas[3] — and start to upload videos. You can post videos of any length up to 15 minutes, as long as the file size is under 2GB. Be sure your videos have a call to action! There’s more on that in the upcoming post Getting Video Results.

After you’ve had some views of your videos, go to YouTube Insight[4] in your My Account section to see a demographic breakdown of your audience by age, region, and gender. If you are using an embedded a Google Checkout button, you can also measure success through the number of online sales you have received.

Next up: Plan Your YouTube Video


Create Your YouTube Channel is the 134th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 359. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[2] By The Way

[3] YouTube’s Handbook for Ideas: bit.ly/9iduiy

[4] YouTube Insight: bit.ly/cYOrmz

Becoming Popular on YouTube

In our previous post, Setting Up YouTube, we began a brand new series on YouTube with a introduction on how to set up YouTube for your enterprise.

In this post, we continue our new series on YouTube with a look at the most viewed videos and discuss why, as well as how to get views for your videos.

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Becoming Popular on YouTube

Here’s a ranking of the most popular YouTube videos of all time, as of mid-2011:

  • Justin Bieber — Baby ft. Ludacris[1] with 561,868,046
  • Lady Gaga Bad Romance[2] with 386,769,838 views
  • Shakira – Waka Waka(This Time for Africa)[3] with 351,928,810
  • Eminem – Love The Way You Lie ft. Rihanna[4] with 344,964,046
  • Charlie bit my finger[5] with 335,752,852
  • Justin Bieber – One Time[6] with 247,027,414

A quick review of these videos shows they have one thing in common: pop singers. Five of the six are music videos from hot pop singers. OK, that’s understandable. Lady Gaga is a great visual artist. Justin Bieber is a tween idols. Number four is a music video by Eminem featuring Rihanna, both hot pop stars. So you can understand, given the marketing hype behind these artists, why they are popular, although the relatively low popularity of Pitbull makes him an outlier.

The #5 video shows a toddler biting his brother’s finger. Huh? It’s cute, we suppose, but no cuter than the millions of cute kitten, dog, and baby videos on YouTube. Its journey to hundreds of millions of views was chronicled by Slate back in 2009:[7]

In May 2007, the father of two British tykes uploaded a home video he wanted to share with the kids’ godfather in Colorado and a few American colleagues. After three months, only a few dozen people had seen the video, and he considered taking it off the site. Then, something strange happened: On Aug. 24, 2007, the video was viewed 25 times in California. Three days later, that number was up to 79, with a dozen more coming in from Washington, Texas, and Wisconsin. The number of daily views doubled roughly every week as “Charlie Bit Me” spread around the country and through Europe. On Nov. 5, a couple of guys in Canada filmed a frame-by-frame remake[8] [currently with more than 6 million views of its own]. Two weeks later, CollegeHumor.com linked to the video,[9] and by January it was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

While this phenomenon is interesting, it’s hard to derive any practical principals of viralocity from it. Clearly, however, it shows the power of word of mouth, so try to make your videos so memorable people tell each other about them.

What all these videos really have in common is: They’re entertaining.

This is a key element to ensure that your YouTube videos are seen: You must do your best to make your video entertaining. This may be difficult or impossible, depending on the problem you solve (think embarrassing personal hygiene products, for example), but if you want to reach a wide audience, it’s a goal to strive for. That said, you may already know a lot about how to reach your target audience, and appealing to their emotions, empathy, or eliciting a gut reaction may work in other venues. If so, be sure you apply these techniques to your YouTube videos as well.

Next up: Create Your YouTube Channel


Becoming Popular on YouTube is the 133rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 355. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] Bieber: bit.ly/d4EslX

[2] Lada Gaga: bit.ly/90FuWJ

[5] Charlie the biter: bit.ly/duIbfw

[6] Bieber, again: http://youtu.be/CHVhwcOg6y8

[7] Charlie’s journey: bit.ly/96APJb

[8] Charlie Bit Me… remix: bit.ly/bti3O5

[9] CollegeHumor.com: bit.ly/9doaIi

Setting Up YouTube

Setting Up YouTube

In our previous post, Try a Facebook Ad, we concluded our series on Facebook with a final post about how to set up a Facebook ad, how to target your audience, and how to price the ad.

In this post, we begin a brand new series on YouTube with a introduction on how to set up YouTube for your enterprise.

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Setting Up YouTube

“What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube”

Erik Qualman, SocialNomics

“We’re still in the process of picking ourselves up off the floor
after witnessing firsthand the fact that a 16-year-old YouTuber
can deliver us 3 times the traffic in a couple of days
that some excellent traditional media coverage has over 5 months.”

Michael Fox, founder of Shoes of Prey

YouTube has gotten so big, and is so multifaceted, we had to include two quotes about it to begin this chapter. It’s hard to believe that a social computing site that is barely six years old has grown to have such influence in the online and offline worlds.

When Yakov Lapitsky uploaded the first video on YouTube, at 8:27PM on Saturday April 23rd, 2005, he hardly expected he was making history. The 19-second video shows YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. It has had 2,827,204 views as of this writing. And it’s really . . . boring. Nothing special. And 2.8 million people have watched it. Big deal, you might say, that’s the same as the number of people who watch the USA Network on TV every day (how did you know that?)

Consider, though, that the viewership of the oldest video on YouTube represents but the merest fraction of the 15 billion views YouTube garnered in the month of May, 2010.  As of January, 2012, YouTube was up to 4 billion views every single day.[1]

Now surely your business has a much more interesting story to tell than Yakov, who spends most of his 19 seconds of fame talking about elephant trunks. Clearly what you do is more significant than some guy’s visit to a zoo. Definitely worthy of a video.

You may think you lack the technical expertise to create a professional-looking video, and you may be right.

But that doesn’t matter. Not even a little bit.

The YouTube phenomenon has been built on poorly-produced, shaky camera, fuzzy-but-sincere videos. It almost is better to not be too slick — people tend to equate homemade videos with honesty and authenticity. Forget the lights and special effects and perfectly coiffed actors. Turn your mobile phone camera on some real people talking about your products, and you may be even more effective than slick, Hollywood-quality productions.

One of our clients paid big bucks to have an ad agency make a series of client testimonial videos. These productions had multiple camera views, tracking shots, graphics that zoomed in and out, and the clients were well-spoken and convincing.

They posted them on YouTube and promoted them on their blog. The result: Over six months the 12 videos in aggregate had fewer than 1,200 views. One video has three views, and two of them were from us. The company probably dropped $120,000 on the package, yielding an outlay of $100 per view. You’d do better handing out C-notes on street corners.

On the other hand, take the case of Shoes of Prey, mentioned in the second quote that opened this chapter. This Australian startup company makes custom — also called bespoke — shoes, and a 16-year-old enthusiast (one might call her an evangelist) known online as Juicystar07 and offline as Blair Fowler created a nine-minute video[2] extolling the virtues of being able to design your own shoes. Blair is quite the businesswoman, and she’s very much at home in front of a camera. She hosts giveaways and Shoes of Prey paid her to pitch their shoes. Her site is an example of a teen-girl phenomenon called a “haul” site, where girls post their latest beauty or fashion acquisitions for discussion.

The result of Blair’s video about Shoes of Prey was more than 450,000 views and more than 90,000 comments on the company’s site, making it the fifth-most-viewed video on YouTube worldwide when it debuted.

Small problem, though: The shoes are probably out of the price range of Blair’s followers. But they’ll grow up someday, and they have older sisters and mothers they can influence.

OK, so they got a big bump in brand awareness among people who probably are not going to become customers in the short term. Shoes of Prey could have left it at that, but they didn’t. Take a look at how they took an integrated approach to this promotion:

  • They created a strategy to reach their target market — the older friends, older sisters and mothers of Blair’s 13- to 17-year-old audience — by encouraging the younger girls’ online discussions, and by requiring the girls to comment on Blair’s site about their shoe designing experience
  • They changed their Website to make it easier for the girls to share the shoes they’d designed on Facebook and Twitter
  • They ran searches on Twitter to find every conversation about their brand (see the Measure Results post), and engaged with the people who were talking about them
  • They blogged about their experience
  • They tweeted about their blog post, with the goal of getting the mainstream media to pick up the story (they did)
  • They got retweeted by social media star Robert Scoble,[3] and more than a hundred others, resulting in coverage by lots of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal blog

In other words, Shoes of Prey followed many of the recommendations you’ve read about in this book and they achieved a tremendous result: what the company calls “a permanent 300% uplift in sales.”[4]

One very important thing about Blair and her community: Although she is paid to review and promote products, she is very upfront with her fans about this. She has established a relationship of trust with them. They know she’s picky about what she promotes, and does not accept all offers. They know that when she’s enthusiastic about a product, it’s because she likes it.

Because she is dealing with her community with integrity, she can get away with making enough money from her venture to necessitate retaining an agent.

Blair’s able to do this because of the way she portrays herself in her videos. In the Shoes of Prey video, she suddenly stops her pitch and mentions her bandaged finger. She’s lost a nail, and she’s pretty bummed about it. But she felt she should explain and share her experience with her fans. This is pure gold. She’s Being a Person!

The lesson for businesses is not that you can succeed on YouTube if you’re a telegenic 16-year-old girl with a perky personality. It is that you can succeed on YouTube if you are authentic, trustworthy, and honest.

Next up: Becoming Popular on YouTube


Setting Up YouTube is the 132nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 354. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] TechCrunch YouTube Reaches 4 Billion Views Per Daytcrn.ch/wQXtIW

[2] See Fowler’s video: bit.ly/cXRrIR

[3] Robert Scoble’s blog: bit.ly/9NMNyh

[4] Michael’s blog post How we tripled our sales using YouTubebit.ly/d2qKVz

Try a Facebook Ad

Try a Facebook Ad

In our previous post, Join Facebook Groups, we continued our series on Facebook by discussing the importance of Facebook groups and why to join them.

In this post, we conclude our series on Facebook with a final post about how to set up a Facebook ad, how to target your audience, and how to price the ad.

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Try a Facebook Ad

Facebook offers surprisingly affordable and very targetable advertisings. It’s pretty easy to get started, and you can set a daily campaign budget. Just select the Advertising link at the bottom of any page, select Create an Ad, and fill in the form. You’ll want to spend some time thinking of the ad title, since this will be one of the main elements that will attract members to click on your ad. You get 135 characters for the body of the ad, less than the limit for a tweet, so make it work for you. Get right to the point; your objective is to get a click.

You also must provide a small image for the ad. You’ll want to think about this as well. Come up with something meaningful that makes the member want to click. Don’t just go with your enterprise’s logo.

Clicking on the ad will send the member to a Website you designate. Avoid the temptation to simply direct people to the main page of your Website. It’s far better to create a special page on your site, a microsite, or a special video in your YouTube channel, to receive those who click. This page should acknowledge the visitor, possibly by mentioning where they came from, and it should also get right to the point. You only have seconds to convince the visitor not to leave. Be sure the page has a call to action.

The next section of the Advertising page enables you to target your ad to a specific subset of Facebook members (unless you’ve got tons of money, you’ll definitely want to do this.) You can show the ad by location, age, gender, relationship status, languages spoken, interests, education and work, and even by connections to one of your pages, events, groups, or applications.

For example, you could target an ad to unmarried members from New York who are in college, speak Spanish, and who are interested in clean water. As you can see from the next figure, that’s a pretty small bunch of folks.

Facebook ad targeting

Figure 1 — Example of a Targeted Facebook Ad Campagin

The final section enables you to name your ad campaign, set a daily budget, and select either a contin­uously running ad, or one that runs only on certain dates and times.

The last bit on the page is perhaps the most important, and it’s easy to miss. Facebook suggests a minimum bid per click, generally under $1. This is the ceiling you will pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Don’t just accept this default!

Instead, click “Set a Different Bid (Advanced Mode)” and examine the suggested range that Facebook provides. You can set the per click price to as little as one cent, but we don’t recommend this, even if you like to pinch pennies. The reason is that the advertising space on Facebook is quite limited, so your ad is competing with other ads to be shown. Facebook doesn’t say how they determine which ads are shown, but it probably involves the amount the advertiser will pay-per-click and the percentage of ads that get clicked on. If your bid is too low, you won’t get many impressions — showings of the ad. And if your ad doesn’t get shown, nobody can click on it.

On the other hand, the amount per click that Facebook suggests may be higher than is necessary to give you good response. You’ll want to experiment with the amount to determine what is best for your ad.

You’ll notice that Facebook gives you an estimate of how many clicks per day you’re likely to get for your ad. It’s a rough guide you can use to set up your daily budget, but don’t depend entirely on their number.

Facebook also offers to let you pay for impressions instead of paying for clicks.

Don’t ever pay for impressions in any Web advertising unless you really know what you’re doing!

An impression means someone saw your ad. One of the reasons you might ever be interested in this is if you’re doing a branding-oriented campaign just to get your name out there. And even then it’s generally only a good idea if the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is very small.

To compare the two major options, we recently created an ad. Facebook recommended paying 93 cents per click and estimated we’d get 54 clicks per day. We changed the campaign to pay-per-impression and Facebook recommended paying 40 cents per thousand impressions with an estimated 125,000 impressions per day. Doing the quick math indicates that for the pay-per-click campaign — which delivers 54 members to our Webpage — we’d pay $50.22 a day. For the pay-per-impression campaign we’d pay $50 per day, which doesn’t seem too bad. The problem is we have no idea how many clicks we’ll get from such a campaign. The campaign might result in the same number, fewer, or many more visitors to our Webpage, but we pay the same even if it only delivers a single visitor to our Webpage.

Because you can’t be certain of the return from a pay-per-impression campaign, we recommend staying with the pay-per-click model, at least until you’ve figured out how Facebook members are responding to your ads. You might also want to go with pay-per-impression after your pay-per-click campaign response has started to decline. This could mean that you’ve gotten the most-likely people to click and, since they’re not going to click twice, it may be more difficult to reach the rest of the audience. At that point, putting your ad in front of more people with a pay-per-impression campaign might make sense.

Whatever kind of ad campaign you select, be sure to read Facebook’s advertising help pages before embarking on your first campaign.[1] To maximize your ad spend, you should also consider doing split testing, a technique in which you test two or more variations of an ad and measure the results. There’s more on split testing in our upcoming post Optimizing for Google. Allfacebook.com has a very good post about Facebook advertising that you also should check out.[2]

Next up: Setting Up YouTube


Try a Facebook Ad is the 131st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 351. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] Facebook help: bit.ly/9ifotk

[2] AllFacebook’s article 10 Facebook Advertising Tips For Brilliant Marketersbit.ly/c0cACF

Join Facebook Groups

Join Facebook Groups

In our previous post, Control Your Facebook Privacy Settings, we continued our series on Facebook by discussing the various privacy settings on Facebook and how to control them.

In this post, we continue with our series on important things to do on Facebook with a look at Facebook groups and why to join them.

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Join Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups are a great way to meet your community members. You can search for groups to join or create your own. You are limited to joining or creating up to 200 groups, a much higher limit than, say, LinkedIn, which limits you to 50 group memberships. The Groups application page displays updates from your groups as well as groups your friends have joined recently.

You can join or create a group by clicking on the Groups or Create Group links on the left bar of your main Facebook page. You might need to click More in order to see the links. If you’ve joined any groups, the icons, names, and number of members will be listed there, as in the next figure.

Facebook groups Figure 1 — Facebook Groups Example

You can also see and easily join the Groups your friends belong to by clicking Friends’ Groups. Enter pretty much any term you’re interested in finding Groups for into the search bar and you’ll probably find one or more interesting groups. You can check out the Group and see publicly viewable information before deciding to join.

Facebook group search

Figure 2 — Search for Facebook Groups

Click the Create A Group button to create your own group. You’ll see a form like the following figure.

 Facebook create group

Figure 3 — Create Your Own Facebook Group

Make sure your group’s name and description contain keywords your community is likely to use in a search. After you’ve created your group, invite all your friends to join. You can even create a Like button to post on your Website that will promote the group.

Of course, if you create a group, you need to be the host — or, as we will discuss in the forthcoming post Building Your Community, the experience architect. This means it’s up to you to invite your guests, make them feel at home, and get them talking.

Next up: Try A Facebook Ad


Join Facebook Groups is the 130th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 347. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Control Your Facebook Privacy Settings

In our previous post, Facebook Events and Notes, we continued our series on Facebook by discussing a few of the unique features of Facebook and why they are important.

In this post, we go in depth into the various privacy settings on Facebook and how to control them.

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Control Your Privacy Settings

Historically, changing your privacy defaults on Facebook could be a challenge. After years of member complaints, Facebook recently made it a lot easier to manage some of these settings. There’s now a button on the top bar to the right of the Home button that looks like a lock. Click it and you see:

Facebook new privacy settings main menu

Facebook new privacy settings main menu

Using these three sections, you can  change the default privacy settings, which in most cases are to share with everyone, including non-members. Select “Who can see my stuff?” to control who can see your future posts, find out how to review posts and where you may be tagged, and control what people can see on your timeline.

Select “Who can contact me” to control whether non-friends can send you messages and whether non-friends can send you friend requests.

Select “How do I stop someone from bothering me?” to block obnoxious users.

This is all pretty simple, but it’s just the tip of the privacy iceberg. Select “See More Settings” to get into the nitty gritty of Facebook privacy settings. You see:

Facebook more privacy settings

Facebook more privacy settings

You’ll want to especially check out the Apps section where you can control how apps access your information. You may be surprised to find out that people using apps can see lots of your information. Here’s Facebook’s explanation:

People on Facebook who can see your info can bring it with them when they use apps. This makes their experience better and more social. Use the settings below to control the categories of information that people can bring with them when they use apps, games and websites.

Did you imagine that by inviting a friend to use a Facebook app lots of information about you and the friend would be available to the app creator? We recommend restricting this information, even though doing so may affect your ability to use an app.

We suggest that you seriously think about exposing relationship, religious and politicial and activities and interests information. Recent research has shown that people can determine many intimate details of your life through your Facebook information. Researchers developed a system that was “88% accurate for determining male sexuality, 95% accurate in determining African-American from Caucasian, and 85% accurate in differentiating Republican from Democrat. The system was also able to classify whether a person was a Christian or Muslim 82% of the time. Interestingly, the system was able to detect substance abuse about 73% of the time.”

While Facebook should be praised for making these settings more visible, other settings are more obscure. For example, to turn off the setting controlling who can see your location information, you need to know to go to https://www.facebook.com/about/location. To control your privacy in the upcoming Facebook Graph Search, you have to know to go to https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch/privacy.

We suggest you periodically Google “Facebook privacy settings” to stay up to date on the latest ways you can control your Facebook information. You can also click the little magnifying glass icon on the privacy settings menu to search for specific settings. For example, searching for “check in” shows the following:

Facebook privacy search box

Facebook privacy search box

Since Facebook is constantly changing how your information is shared, we recommend you visit your privacy settings on a regular basis.

Next up: Join Facebook Groups


Control Your Facebook Privacy Settings is the 129th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 345. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances